How experiencing and anticipating temporal landmarks influence motivation
Dai and Li review how experiencing and anticipating temporal landmarks affect motivation. They describe landmarks as moments that stand out from routine time and divide it into separate mental accounting periods, in three kinds: transition points on a social timetable, momentous personal events and significant public events. Their main account is psychological separation of the present self from a past self, with big-picture thinking, renewed energy after a break and changed environments as further proposals. They also describe conditions under which landmarks fail to motivate: a history of consistent success, environment changes that remove habit cues, and landmarks that fall between now and a deadline.
Dai and Li review how experiencing and anticipating temporal landmarks affect motivation. They describe landmarks as moments that stand out from routine time and divide it into separate mental accounting periods, in three kinds: transition points on a social timetable, momentous personal events and significant public events. Their main account is psychological separation of the present self from a past self, with big-picture thinking, renewed energy after a break and changed environments as further proposals. They also describe conditions under which landmarks fail to motivate: a history of consistent success, environment changes that remove habit cues, and landmarks that fall between now and a deadline.
Written from the full text, author-posted copy, 2026-11-02.
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Dai, H., & Li, C. (2019). How experiencing and anticipating temporal landmarks influence motivation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 26, 44-48. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.012